


The Woman Who Beat Her (Among Other Things)

by ShannonXL



Series: Shit My Sherlock Does [12]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dom/sub, Domestic Violence, Drug Addict Sherlock, Drug Use, F/F, F/M, Fem!Sherlock, Female Sherlock Holmes, Gaslighting, Knifeplay, Lesbian Irene, Other, Pregnancy, Sub Sherlock Holmes, girl!sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-03-11 11:21:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3325598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShannonXL/pseuds/ShannonXL
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock has been with a full spectrum of people, and she's left a trail of mistakes like corpses in her wake. </p><p>And then there's the Woman. The one that matters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Woman Who Beat Her (Among Other Things)

She met Charlie M. when she was fifteen. He offered her an ounce for a blow job. She offered to spare his life instead. It made him laugh. He was tall, thick in all sorts of ways, and she knew from looking at him that he was addicted, to cigarettes first but crack was more pressing. His smell indicated that he had not washed (air freshener, stale deodorant, dirt from another side of the city on his laces) in two days. That he was suffering from vitamin D deficiency. That he would never remember her name correct,y so she told him her name was Cheryl.

He offered her a hit, and she accepted.

* * *

Irene touches the scar, thin and pale, crossing her belly like a half-moon sliver. 

* * *

Lestrade was another mistake. She knew before it began. But she _wanted_ him. She denied it, of course, prolonged it for as long as she could. Hid her drug use from him (he wouldn’t approve), made it seem like she wasn’t high when she was, kept up appearances about her dosage, her frequency, her habits. She was sure that she was managing herself, but she was equally sure that he wouldn’t see it that way. She wanted him to rely on her, and he wouldn’t do that if he didn’t think she was sober enough. And when he discovered (because she knew he would discover) the marks on her arms, on her legs, she made sure it was in the middle of a case, one where he _needed_ her. Because she _wanted_ , not just his resources, not just his body. She even lied to Mycroft, told him she’d made a friend. She even believed it. That’s how good the lie was. 

* * *

Irene commands her to press her palms against the wall. 

* * *

There was the woman she fucked in rehab. There was Victor, sweet Victor, as a girl and as a man, Sherlock wanted to love them as they deserved. But they were both too complicated*, and aromantic** to boot. There was a motley assortment of men and women and people who feel in between and people who did not. She danced with a drag queen in Amsterdam. She lay with a Prince (well, a Kennedy) in Boston. She flirted with dancers and musicians and groupies. She slept with a woman with notches in her headboard, and for a moment when she woke up Sherlock wasn’t sure who those notches belonged to. She fucked for fun, for the scandal, for the sour face Mycroft would make at her selection of partners. She did it because she wanted some place warm to sleep. Once, on a dare, she sat in the room and narrated commands to a couple struggling with intimacy. They thanked her for it, but of course it didn’t please her the same way. 

*Self-absorbed

**Victor remains so, Sherlock remains so save for one rather significant Woman

* * *

Irene presses the palm of her own soft hand against Sherlock’s skin, rubbing up, circling her breasts on the way to her shoulders, around her neck, to her lips. Sherlock kisses her fingers. 

* * *

Charlie thought he was blackmailing her. His attempts to gaslight her were often unintentional, and she saw it for what it was. He’d been trained. He was sure, so sure, that what he was doing was love. And in fact, Sherlock recognized the symptoms of love. But she couldn’t find it in herself to reciprocate them, to replicate the chemical responses in herself. She didn’t even _like_ Charlie most days.  Where was the sense in loving him? 

Mycroft didn’t approve, but he never did, and he was far too busy with the sinking ship that was his marriage to bother her about it. 

So she stayed in Charlie’s apartment, when it suited her, and lied about where she went every day, and suffered his irritating obligation to berate her every time she missed a meal, or a date, or some presumed evening spent together. She was far more invested in the murder by the pond, the young boy drowned, presumed an accident, but she knew better, didn’t she, Sherlock always did…

It did not surprise her, when Charlie grabbed her. She thought she had been expecting it, and she slithered out of his grasp automatically. He had both hands on her throat, and she slipped both of hers between them, like a prayer pressed against her chin. She grabbed one wrist, and used the flat part of her palm to slam into his nose, breaking it. He staggered backwards, muttering curses, and she used the leverage she had on his arm to twist it behind his back. She leaned over him, knee digging into his spine, yanking against his shoulder socket. She dislocated it, out of habit. 

He tried to grab her again, on the way out. She bit off his ear, tearing it. She spat it out in her hand, tossing it in the garbage while he screamed and fumbled for a phone to call an ambulance.

And then she left.

Some habits are easier to break. 

* * *

Irene starts slow. It’s agonizing. 

Irene’s kisses are feather-light and it makes Sherlock _writhe_. 

* * *

Charlie reappeared, and it annoyed her more than she could say.

“Hey.”

She snarled some response, which he of course expected.

“I don’t wanna fight, I just came for something.”

She grimaced.

“What? Come to bite off my ear in return?”

He glared.

“I’m not stupid.”

“Incorrect,” she spat. “You’re an imbecile.”

“I came to see my kid! That’s all.”

Not stupid, not about this one, terribly inconvenient fact.

“I had an abortion.”

* * *

She had not. 

In fact, she’d arrived at Mycroft’s, with blood sticking to her teeth, withdrawal symptoms creeping in, making her brain feel slow and disoriented and her mood feel soggy and dim. She had been breathing heavily, perhaps she ran, she doesn’t recall now, unimportant detail. She told him the news, told him her intention. 

It all made sense, at the time. His marriage was failing. She had what he needed (well, she didn’t, what he needed was to dissolve the marriage and live his life the way he wanted to live it instead of how it should be lived, but she was tired of his advice and he had no interest in hers, so she was content to give him the help he needed in the self-destruction he seemed to have chosen for himself). She had never met Gregory, _the husband_ , but she was sure that Mycroft had chosen someone reliable and trustworthy and full of the overwhelming capacity for self-sacrifice necessary for rearing a child. She believed, and still believes, that Gregory was married to a man that did not and would never deserve him. But none of that is relevant. Will he take it?

He was too shocked (and Sherlock is utterly thrilled that she had, for once, managed to shock him) to say anything but yes.

* * *

“Sherlock.”

Sherlock gasps, struggling to keep her palms pressed to the wall. She is craving touch, anything, all of it, everything. It is a simple, knife edge of concentration. No distraction, nothing else in the world can tear her away from this moment. 

“Color, dear.”

“Green,” she rasps, and Irene continues. 

* * *

Irene’s marks never last as long as Sherlock wants them to. Particularly the cuts. She draws such elegant patterns on her back, eliciting only the faintest trickle of blood. It’s not about the bloodletting at all, it’s about the sensation. Sherlock’s mind closes, until the only things present, sending ripples through her consciousness, are the sounds of Irene as she breathes and moves. The press of something cold and sharp and slick. The rush as her skin parts like silk. The ache. The burn. The pain. The silver string of pain. The delicious trembling chord of pain. The siren screaming, singing pain. Irene will kiss her, coax her to orgasm, and she will christen her in a blessing of power and pain, achieving something intimate and beautiful in a way nothing and no one have ever come close to achieving. 

* * *

Sherlock told Irene, of course. 

It was on one of the honeymoons. Irene traced the line and asked if it had hurt. Sherlock surprised herself when she answered honestly. It had. And not in the way she expected. The withdrawal had felt deadly, coursing through her body like a million torn muscles and a sickness that never stopped and a hundred different terrible sensations overwhelming her all the time. She was unconscious for the procedure. She went to the hospital with a swollen belly and woke up that same afternoon with an empty cavern inside her. She was often made to feel guilty, for not wanting the things a normal girl should want. She was supposed to want boys, and she rarely did, and the thought of them disgusted her more than it pleased her, on the whole. She was supposed to want to be a doctor (or a nurse, probably), to want to be pretty and quiet and to break up fights instead of starting them. She had bruised knuckles more often than not. And she was not bothered by these things, by what other people thought of her. They made her feel guilty, but she could ignore that. 

She rarely made herself feel guilty for being strange. But lying in bed, tracing the odd lump of her stomach underneath the clean, patterned sheets, she felt herself become guilty. Why hadn’t she wanted it? The mediocre version of her life. Surely it would be simpler. Maybe even better, on the grand scale. Why couldn’t she force herself to want things, like Mycroft? The boring marriage and the simple life of a well-educated, mild-mannered adult. They would not make her happy, but her life rarely made her happy as it was. 

She did not sleep in the hospital. She was too busy asking herself why she was a constantly unhappy person. 

Irene had kissed her temple, and listened. 

* * *

Sherrinford called her ‘aunt’. Sherlock called her ‘Cerise’. 


End file.
